Hundreds of people attended Thursday's funeral of 19-year-old soldier Dvir Sorek who was found dead hours earlier with stab wounds near a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the killing as a terror attack and vowed the killers would be brought to justice. Israeli troops raided a nearby Palestinian village and the military said it was sending reinforcements to the area.
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The killing threatened to inflame tensions between Israelis and Palestinians just over a month before Israel's general election. In response to the incident, Netanyahu's political allies called to increase settlement construction and enact a heavy-handed response.
Sorek, from the community of Ofra, north of Jerusalem, was a student at a pre-military yeshiva in the Gush Etzion bloc, south of Jerusalem. His body was found on the side of a road near the yeshiva with stab wounds.
IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said Sorek was neither armed nor in uniform when his body was found. He said that the army was investigating the circumstances of his death and searching for suspects.
As part of the searches, a column of Israeli jeeps entered the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Fajar, a mile south of where the body was found. Soldiers blocked the road and searched homes.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas issued a statement praising Sorek's murder.
"We salute the hero fighters, sons of our people, who carried out the heroic operation which killed a soldier of the occupation army," Hamas said in a statement. The Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad also hailed the killing as "heroic and bold."
US President Donald Trump's Mideast negotiator, Jason Greenblatt, attacked Hamas' statements, writing on his Twitter account that the terrorist group "chooses death & destruction over taking care of people they claim to lead."
Rabbi Shlomo Wilk, head of Sorek's yeshiva, told Israel Radio that Sorek had gone to Jerusalem to buy presents for the school's faculty. Wilk said Sorek had called a friend and said he would return on time.
"When he was late, we started to worry," Wilk said. "Fairly quickly we understood that something wasn't right and we got the police involved."
Sorek's father, Yoav, is the editor of a Hebrew language Jewish history magazine and the Shiloach Journal for Policy and Thought.
Dvir was the grandson of a prominent religious-nationalist rabbi, Benjamin Herling, one of the forerunners of the settlement movement, who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist near Nablus in 2000.
Netanyahu visited the scene of the attack on Thursday evening. Earlier, the prime minister said in a statement that security forces were "in pursuit now in order to capture the despicable terrorist and bring him to account."
Speaking at the inauguration of new homes in the community of Beit El, north of Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that Israel "will reach those who seek to harm us," and "strengthen our roots in our homeland."
President Reuven Rivlin offered his condolences and said that the security forces were "pursuing the murderers and will not rest until we find them."
"Our prayers this morning are with the family of the murdered soldier and our hearts grieve for the life cut short," Rivlin said. "We fight terrorism without compromise to ensure the security of our people."
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein responded to the attack on Thursday, saying "we should move in the direction of exercising sovereignty over our settlements. To make it clear that terrorism will not drive us away," he said.
